Social media fills with footage from Astroworld tragedy. Some of it helps.
Tragedy struck during the Travis Scott show at the Astroworld Festival in Houston Friday night. The details are still emerging, but here's what we know so far: A surge of people compacted the crowd in on itself, killing at least eight and leaving dozens injured.
Given the ubiquitous presence of phones on the scene, plenty of horrifying footage has found its way online. If you spend any time on Twitter Saturday, you may well have run across disturbing videos and images. Once again, tech companies — and the world — are being forced to wrestle with the fact that social media can be too immediate, and there are few meaningful ways to police it.
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The content of those horrific posts, and the motivations of people in posting them, is not what this story is about. Rather, we'll turn to the on-the-scene reporters who are actually doing useful work in documenting the dysfunction and confusion that surrounded the tragedy — and may be useful in any investigation into who or what allowed it to unfold.
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Here, for example, you can see something clearly wrong with the mood of the show and its level of security. People are dancing on emergency vehicles as they try to fight through a crowd of 50,000.
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You can also see footage of concertgoers begging staff, Travis Scott, camera operators, and whoever might listen, to stop the show. Still, the show went on.
Here, a couple of distraught concertgoers climb onto the stage, begging a camera operator to help them shut it down.
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"Fans were recording the concert and people doing CPR," Madeline Eskins, an attendee told Rolling Stone. "Fans were yelling at the stage crew around us, saying 'stop the concert, people are dying. No one listened."
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Signs of trouble were present from the beginning of Astroworld. A stampede of people burst through to enter the event — some of which also happened at the event two years prior, injuring three.
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Tim Marcin is an Associate Editor on the culture team at Mashable, where he mostly digs into the weird parts of the internet. You'll also see some coverage of memes, tech, sports, trends, and the occasional hot take. You can find him on Bluesky (sometimes), Instagram (infrequently), or eating Buffalo wings (as often as possible).
